JOE THE BIGOT
By Janis Ian, October 18, 2008

We're on our second yard sign. The first one went up yesterday afternoon, right at the corner of our property, here in our little conservative neighborhood. Lots of McCain signs on our street. We thought that, with a school right across from our house, and all the traffic going by, we'd try to balance things out a little.

It was a nice, big sign.

When we got up this morning, it was gone. Worse yet, last night someone or someones had gone up and down the street next to ours, tearing down Obama signs and writing "nigger-lover" and other obscenities on people's homes and cars. Admittedly, they defaced one McCain sign, but the rest were Obama. My assumption is that these hooligans are so stupid, they actually thought "Hey, let's tear down a McCain sign - they'll think it's just vandalism then!"

This morning we went down to Democratic headquarters and bought 10 small signs, which we distributed over our half acre yard. This afternoon, two volunteers brought us another large sign. The older, Jesse, has spent six thousand dollars of his own money to have his car painted with Obama-Biden signs. The slogan on the side says "Not for myself, but for my three grandchildren." The other volunteer, Clyde, is a veteran determined that our country won’t end up like the country he fought in.

While they were putting up the sign, a stranger pulled over and yelled "Do you really want a black man runnning this country?!" When Jesse and Clyde yelled out "Heck, yeah!" the obscenities started to flow. The stranger got out of his car, taunting us, yelling epithets. He looked at us, four white people working to put a black man in office. Then he looked at my partner, a red-headed white woman, and caustically said "A black man doesn't represent YOUR CULTURE." He called us “un-American,” then finallly drove away.

Un-American. Whose America? Apparently, not mine, if he’d known I was a Jew. Not my partner’s, if he’d known she was from the North. Just his. Joe Bigot’s culture. A culture where it’s okay to vote by color-the-numbers.

I don’t know why he thinks that in this day and age, he has the right to bear that kind of prejudice. I do know that the level of outright fear-mongering and hate-mongering Sarah Palin is inciting in her rallies is frightening. I do know that when John McCain glibly assures a woman that Obama is not a Muslim, it doesn't change the fact that Palin speaks what McCain's handlers tell her to speak.

I know women, lifelong Democrats, who are voting for Sarah Palin simply because she's female. That's un-American. You're supposed to vote for the best-qualified candidate, not the one with a uterus.

I know people who think it's okay to tear down signs like ours. That's un-American, too. This country was founded on freedom of speech.

For every "Joe Six-Pack" and “Joe the Plumber,” McCain and Palin embrace, there's a "Joe Bigot" sitting at home applauding, gathering up the courage to tear down a sign or deface a windshield, and glorying in the fact that Palin is just as ignorant and stupid as he is. Saying “I’m voting for her because she’s just like me” is pathetic. I wouldn’t want ME for president! I want someone a lot smarter, and a lot better qualfied, than I am.